Rick's Gaming Journal, covering board games, card games, role playing games and other games in and of life.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

SNAFU and Haz

Thanks to "Mr. ekted" Jim C., I noticed that the template of this weblog broke for some reason. It took a bit of time to reconstruct the template, so the promised post will have to wait until tomorrow.

Just to have a bit of game-related content on here, we finally got to play some (Ha Ha) Hacienda (or plain Haz to us) over the past few weeks. It's not Wolfie's greatest game ever (that's good ol' 555), but it meshes a lot of game mechanisms into a nice package. The ones that ususally stand out to gamers are the card drafting mechanism (popularly attributed to The Moonie) and the "score points by connecting to an adjacent hex" thing used by Reiner in Through the Sausage. Honestly, it's nothing like Zug um Zug or Durch die Wuste.

Haz has an economic engine that's powered, interestingly, by the game's spatial element. You get money based on contiguous tile sets. There's no virtuous or vicious cycle here. It a novel way to get around the rich-get-richer characteristic that most economic models in games possess.

I'll revisit Haz with a proper review in the future. For the moment, color me satisfied. (BGG Rating: 7/10)